The Detroit Dilemma

A number of years ago, I worked with a woman who was originally from Detroit. She loved her hometown and missed it terribly. I can’t remember her name, but I vividly remember the glow on her face when she talked about the city she’d left behind and to which she vowed to return someday.

I know, right? Hard to believe.

Yet Detroit has a draw, even if it’s a sort of pity vote. Friend and fellow writer Margaret Littman, also has a passion for the city. She says, “I love Detroit’s architecture and public art and wide boulevards. But more than that, I love that Detroit is such a microcosm of America: boomed thanks to ingenuity and innovative and now struggling with what to do next. Plus, I’m a sucker for an underdog.”

Now, Detroit sounds pretty bleak and hopeless in Motor City Breakdown an article in the most recent “Rolling Stone.” Here Mark Binelli, another Detroit expat, takes an evocative look at the decaying city through the lens of the decaying Big Three automakers.

For example:

To get to the conference, I ride the People Mover, an elevated tram that runs through downtown Detroit in a three-mile one-way loop. The city used to have an extensive trolley system, but it was purchased by National City Lines, a front company formed by GM, Firestone, Standard Oil and other corporations with automobile interests, after which the trolley tracks were ripped up and replaced with buses. The People Mover began running in 1987 and seems, in its utter uselessness, as if it might have been built by another secret auto-industry cabal as a way of mocking the very idea of public transportation. The monorail cars are automated and driverless, like trams at the airport or an amusement park; occasionally, walking along a barren downtown block, you glance up and notice a pair of empty cars passing above your head at a haunted crawl.

But then click to Detroitblog, mentioned in Binelli’s article, and read tender-sad stories unfolding in the shadows of the large-scale decay.

Poor Detroit. The C&VB website, where I went to find photos to use for this post, includes this message about its image library: “All photographs are available free of charge for editorial usage and the positive promotion of metro Detroit as a travel and tourism destination.”

I don’t imagine a lot of places have to specify “positive.”

But like Margaret, underdog cities hold a huge appeal for me, and the decline of a once-great city adds a powerful mystique. It’s on my list. What do you say? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Detroit?

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